This paper provides new evidence on the substitutability between private and pension wealth by exploiting the Italian pension reform of 1992. We use a difference-in-difference estimator that exploits the differential effects of the reform on individuals belonging to several year-of-birth cohorts...

Three issues dominate the public policy debate over savings in Continental Europe. First, can private savings substitute for public pensions in the provision of retirement income, given that the current generosity of pay-as-you-go financed pensions is hardly sustainable in the light of...

In this paper we model the evolution of income risk and consumption growth. We decompose the time series innovation of the income process into its common and cohort-specific components. From these we compute conditional variances which are used as separate risk terms in a consumption growth...

In this paper, we contribute to the current debate on the Italian pension system by analyzing the impact of social security reforms, in terms of both budgetary implications and distributional effects. This is done by simulating the effects of three hypothetical reforms, plus the effects of the...

Using a common agency framework, we characterize possible equilibria when annuities contracts are not exclusive. We discuss theoretical and empirical implications of these equilibria. First, we show that at equilibrium prices are not linear. Then we characterize an equilibrium. We provide...

This paper uses data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to study the relationship between health status and economic welfare at household level. We develop a model to estimate the welfare cost of ill health by exploiting the methodology of the equivalence scales. The crucial variables in...

In this paper we ask what is the length of working life in Europe, whether it differs by gender, birth cohort, and schooling level, and what are the main differences across countries. We also ask whether there is a trend towards shorter working lives, and to what extent it is due to the delayed...